The following outlines the highlights of the second major release of Joomla!
As with previous releases, Joomla! provides a unified and easy-to-use framework for delivering content for websites of all kinds. To support the changing nature of the Internet and emerging web technologies, Joomla! required substantial restructuring of its core functionality and we also used this effort to simplify many challenges within the current user interface. Joomla! 1.5 has many new features.
The goals for the Joomla! 1.5 release are to:
Components, languages, modules, plugins and templates are now collectively known as Extensions.
The improved installer can be found under the extensions option. With versions prior to 1.5 you needed to select a specific extension type when you wanted to install it. With Joomla! 1.5 you just select the extension you want to upload, and click on install. The installer will do all the hard work for you.
This is now defined in the language
This is now implemented by inserting a tag (button is in the editor area) a dotted line appears in the edited text showing the split location for the "Read more...". A new bot takes care of the rest.
It is worth mentioning that this does not have a negative effect on migrated data from older sites. The new implementation is fully backwards compatible.
Mambots have been renamed as "Plugins". Mambots were introduced in Mambo and offered possibilities to add plugin logic to your site mainly for the purpose of manipulating content. In Joomla!, Plugins will now have much broader capabilities than Mambots. Plugins are able to extend functionality at the framework layer as well.
In Joomla! versions prior to 1.5 there was a distinct difference between static and normal content. Both content types are still around, but are not handled as separate items. If you want to create static content, just select "uncategorised" as section and category and the content is handled as static content.
This is the release that developers' have been waiting for. A massive effort has been made to refactor and reorganise the core of Joomla! into a true extendable framework. The new features in the framework are too many to list here but additional documentation can be found on the Joomla! Developer Network site.
We have made every effort to make this version backwards compatible with Joomla 1.0. In order to install 1.0 extensions you will probably need to activate the legacy code plugin. This can be found in the Plugin Manager (it's called "System - Legacy") and you just need to enable it.